On the Rocks
by Capritarius
Summary: Not nearly as simple as the title suggests.  It actually has nothing to do with drinking.See how many metaphors for real life you can find.  I'll give pecan pie to the winner.  Nah, just kidding.
1. Chapter 1

The Young Man looked up sharply. He had no idea how long he had been sitting there, only that he now had a chronic charley horse. _What is a charley horse, anyway?_ The hut in which he was sheltering from the Storm seemed a world of its own, a universe unto itself. It was of an undefined shape, the corners rounded off, the edges rough and cracked, like week-old baguettes drying in the sun. the Storm outside was fierce, a force less like the gentle water the Young Man was used to and more like iridescent tigers falling down, flashing white talons lancing from the festering hives of the clouds. The River down by the way, usually tranquil, was swollen and pulsing with a heartbeat separate to either sky or hut. It looked dead.

Within the ramshackle wooden hut, curiously, the sound from the tiger-rain was muted, alarmingly so, as if all the cicadas of China had hushed save for one lone soul, crying out a swan song before falling into the wave of peers once more. The hut's interior was outwardly like the interior of a whale's throat, yet it had less of the foreboding aspect. _Less baleen, too_. The walls were warped and twisted by immense age and pressures of deeper kinds, the roof an odd crisscross of silvery frameworks, a macabre spider's web with which to snare the escaping dreams of the inhabitants. The two fires were a deep, flickering carnelian colour, and the thick smoke they blew was funneled into an intricate system of veins in the walls only to be released high above, within the Web. The black and white streams disappeared into a sleepy gray pallor.

The chair wasn't at all comfortable, the table was less a table and more a block of timber playing pretend. And then there was the Old Man. He was horrible all over. A burned owl, half-roasted before the startling discovery of its continued life. His face was like an old caramel apple, complete with the colour, the sagging wrinkles, heck, throw in the weird shiny surface too. The mouth was like an eel's, always open, horribly mottled. It seemed to have a life of its own, like a parasite crouched on the man's face. His nose, too, was akin to an herbal growth, like the abdomen of some felle insect, crawling within the man's flesh. The man hunched over, his greasy hair not quite concealing the piercing ink-coloured eyes. They were like the eyeholes in a mask. So deep, you could swim in them. Except these particular waterholes had whirlpools just beneath the surface. Who knows where they went? _If you took away those features, perhaps there would be a smooth, blank surface beneath._

The old man hunched forward upon the table, as if he had grown out of it with all the creeping, leisurely certainty of a mushroom, clutching his chosen Instruments of Destruction. There were Seven of them, small, slender, pale, bone-white. The arcane markings on their faces bespoke terrible power. They glowed in the firelight, which seemed to cast their edges in sharp relief. They looked hungry. _Clocktower__, can you hear me? What are you turning for? _The Young Man leaned back, and for a moment he was back home…


	2. Chapter 2

_The Young Man walks up the road, down the mountain from whence he has come. The Town __ahead__ sprawls like a spider, fat and comfortable in its immense age and reach. The sun at its edge casts a bloody light that pierces into the Heavens with a strange certainty. The Young Man heaves a sigh of relief. White clouds come in from the mountain. They are too far to worry about, though. _There was plenty of time.

_The Town is waiting. It is always waiting. Since before time begins, the town is here. Its age is measured by the __Clocktower__. The __Clocktower__ tolls its message clearly through the skies. _There was no bird who could not be cleaved with the Clocktower's message._ It speaks of days gone by, whispers at the edges of town, dashed hopes, diced dreams, sprinkled lightly with __whistful__ thinking over what was, is, can be, will be, should be, would be, will never be. _

_ Here, the coast, he picks up seashells as a baby. There, the ocean. He plays here as a child. Here, the cat in the box, he finds and nurtures it. There, the cat catches the __neighbour's__ parrot. Red blood, green feathers, blue eyes. _Her eyes…_Here, the school, abandoned. There, the __Clocktower__, a fallen wheel. Here, he is saved. There, he is falling, falling, falling…_

Blue blood, red feathers, green eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

The Young Man came to his senses. The overpowering nostalgia was never far out of reach, always at the edges of his awareness, like predatory cats, prowling at the savannah's outskirts. The Old Man stares intently, the piercing inkblot whirlpools devour everything. There is no hiding from it. It is like gravity. The Old Man and his blackhole eyes, his all consuming aura. The Young Man stared squarely into the blackholes. He dared them to take him. He had nothing left to lose anyway. He was done, spent, he no longer had any fight in him. The Old Man smiled, with the air of one who is about to lay down the trump card, the ultimatum, the final blow in a long struggle of indeterminate age. The Storm continued. _Is it rusted? Does it still fly? _The Old Man hefted his Seven Instruments of Destruction. He scrutinized them sharply, inspecting them, the eyes, left, right, left, right. _here, there, here, there_. TICK, TOCK, TICK, TOCK.

The Old Man chose one specific Instrument of Destruction. He raised it above his head. The light shone off its hungry edge, the bone-white glare intensified to a blinding light. An impure, yet cleansing light. The Young Man closed his eyes, waiting for the finishing blow. The Old Man slammed the card down on the surface of the table. _Go Fish, he says._


End file.
